Funds are requested for partial support of the 2013 Gordon Research Conference on Developmental Biology. This five-day conference, which has been running since 1970, is recognized as the major and most prestigious mid-size meeting in Developmental Biology, bringing together ~150 outstanding senior and junior scientists for discussions of the recent advances in the field. The conference has several features that make it unique. It spans a wide variety of experimental systems and focuses on areas of exceptional activity or promise. This leads to fruitful comparative analyses and raises new questions about underlying mechanisms. 31 invited speakers, chosen based on their creative contributions to the field the field and their ability to promote fruitful discussions, have confirmed their attendance. None of the invited speakers spoke at the last conference in 2011. For the first time, the 2013 conference will take place at the Gordon Conference site in at Il Ciocco Tuscany Resort in Lucca (Barga) Italy, which will encourage an international exchange of ideas. The site is geographically isolated, which will keep participants in close proximity for five days of in-deph discussion, without distractions. The conference format will consist in the mornings and evenings of ~45 short talks followed by discussion and in the afternoon of informal interactions and presentation of ~90 posters. The nine sessions cover classic topics and emerging areas in the field: Organogenesis; Cellular Mechanisms of Early Development; Developmental Genetics; Regulatory Networks of Gene Expression during Development; Evolution of Morphological Diversity: Epithelial Patterning and Morphogenesis; Stem Cell Biology; Patterning and Cell Fate. Some of the session time has been kept uncommitted to choose speakers from abstracts submitted by the participants. By maximizing both formal discussion and informal interactions, the Gordon Conference on Developmental Biology will help to define both the present state and the future of the field.